The Hangover
by SarahBlackwood
Summary: After a great bout of drinking with Enjolras, Grantaire reflects.


This was the first fanfiction I ever wrote. Oh, more than ten years ago. I wanted to post it since I already have the account. I changed it a bit. It was great fun writing it at the time. Review!

I don't own these characters. Though at the time Victor Hugo owned me.

**The Hangover**

"You should know better by now." She said holding a glass of something vile containing raw egg and milk to Grantaire's mouth.

Grantaire who ruefully admitted to himself that he really should know better, pushed

away her hand and made his feeble attempt to sit up in bed.

She looked young in this half-light. She looked barely fifteen, her cheeks still full with baby fat. Her hair was autumn colored, pulled away from her face and held in place with hairpins that Grantaire would find in his bed days after she had gone. Who was Émilie? A girl who came to his bed some nights, some nights he could even remember, others were washed away with so much wine, only to end at the breaking of dawn, Émilie sitting on his windowsill, tying her stays.

"You'll survive though my dear, you always do. Your friend fared much the worse however."

Grantaire followed Émilie's outstretched finger to the foot of the bed where a tall slender form lay tangled in the bed sheets.

"Good God!" He cried, bolting upright in bed. Enjolras moaned weakly and thrust his head over the side of the bed vomiting onto the thin runner that decorated Grantaire's floor. Émilie helped him into a more comfortable position and wiped the spit off of his pale face.

"Etienne? Etienne where am I?" The boy asked between heaving breaths. And that is really all he was now. A boy of twenty-two with an ashen face and tangled golden hair.

"Etienne such dreams I've had. The insurrection, such flames, the streets awash with blood. You were there Etienne, you were there after all, you lay at my feet."

Émilie cradled Enjolras' head in her arms a while and ran stiff fingers through his pale blond hair. Her knuckles were swollen. The girl had arthritis from plying her needle all day and most of the night in a factory stitching uniforms. The hand that held Enjolras' fine boned one was red and chapped. Émilie saw this and drew it away, embarrassed that her lover should see how plain she was beside this man, who was so obviously beautiful even in sickness.

"For Christ's sake you gave him absinthe didn't you? Don't you know that stuff is poison?"

Grantaire said nothing. He hadn't known, hadn't known any of those things. He hadn't given him the absinthe. The boy had taken, recklessly downing most of the bottle while Grantaire could do nothing but protest weakly.

"Lucky I heard you come home last night, lucky I switched shifts with Agnés." She continued.

When all the rest had gone home he had settled down with his bottle and called out mockingly to the blue-eyed god. He had laughed at him.

"How much can you know about yourself if you've never even been drunk? Probably don't even know how."

_Needless to say the youth had drank him under the table, he, Grantaire, more commonly known as the wine cask, beaten by the statuesque boy. _

"_I am going to die." Enjolras had murmured in a moment of startling lucidity. _

"_They will all die with me. All of them sheep, following me to the grave. But you won't will you Etienne? You, the cynic, will be spared to tell the world how I, Marcel Auguste Enjolras, would-be revolutionary, failed."_

"What are you saying Marcelin? I will fight, I will fight for you." He had insisted.

_Enjolras' arms had found his waist again, drawing Grantaire to him not as a sick child clinging to his mother but as a man embraces his brother. _

"_You are drunk," he had said. _

"_So are you."_

"You were crying Etienne, you were sobbing, and I had to get Tissot to tear your door down. This one was lying in a puddle of urine." Émilie said putting Enjolras' fair head on Grantaire's pillow and straightening out his long legs.

_Grantaire had never expected this, never, not from the man who never had a kind word to spare for him, the man he admired more than anything in the world, yes, even worshipped._

_He had played with the idea of swearing faithfulness to the cause, drinking to the Republic or friendship but what Enjolras did then frightened him beyond all reason._

_The boy drooped in his chair, pale head against the edge of the table. _

"_Marcelin?"_

_He was trembling so violently that Grantaire who sat watching, afraid to touch him, feared it might_ _be a seizure_. _Grantaire put one hand on Enjolras' neck, shaking him_ _slightly. _

"_Marcelin. Should I take you home? Do you need anything? Look at me."_

_Pale blond head bobbed up, blue eyes struggling to focus on Grantaire's face. _

"_Do you know who I am?" _

"_Etienne." Came the reply. Impossibly steady and frighteningly serious. He had turned towards Grantaire, draping his arms about him, his head against his chest. Had looked up at him with the bluest eyes._

"_I can hear your heart beat, it beats so fast."_

_And oh damn, damn what to say to this? What to tell this man?_

_He hadn't been able to think straight after that, had found his way home somehow, carrying the unconscious Enjolras like a babe. And had fallen to his knees in the black room crying with unabashed confusion, clutching his friend, thinking he had killed the boy. _

_Then Émilie was there, soothing Émilie, mopping the floor, putting Enjolras into new clothes, bathing his forehead with water. _

"Got to go now." Émilie said all at once standing up and putting on her shoes. "I'll be back to check on you. If he wakes up, make him drink water."

Alone with the fair godlet once again.

Enjolras lay motionless in Grantaire's bed. Hair tangled on the damp pillowcase. His breath was shallow, pale face composed and so like marble as he slept. Grantaire could see he eyes moving rapidly beneath closed lids and wondered what he was dreaming.

He leaned over the boy and put his lips against that pale brow. What now? How to act now? What to say to this child? What to tell himself? He buried his face in Enjolras' shoulder. Feeling his friend's breath against his hair, Grantaire fell asleep.

Wine to cure the incessant ache in his head, wine against the worst hangover Grantaire had ever had in his whole career as a drunkard. He sat with his back to Enjolras the smooth sound of his voice cutting through the layers of pain, the only thing keeping him sane. He had tumbled out of bed a scant three hours ago and watched Enjolras straighten his clothes and pull on his boots. He had watched him with almost morbid attentiveness, afraid that if he looked away one of them would have to speak.

Say something Marcelin! Don't just leave like this. But how many times had he done just that himself? Left some girl's bed in silence, Émilie's bed or let her leave his without so much as a word of farewell, just the sound of laces being tied.

He sat down near Grantaire when his speech was over. Someone, was it Courfeyrac? Clapped him on the shoulder. Laughed, incessantly, like a horse, Grantaire reflected not bothering to censor the thought, even for a friend. Words slurred at him. Slurred, was the man drunk? Or was he so drunk even the words of others seemed garbled?

Enjolras was staring at him, he was transformed, he showed no signs of a hangover, no signs of last night's excesses, he sat straight backed, clear eyed, leaned over as if to whisper in Grantaire's ear but seemed to change his mind and drew away from him.

"I want you to thank the girl for me. Émilie was her name what? Is she your mistress?"

Then he turned away face hardening as if he regretted what he just said. "I apologize, it's not my place."

Grantaire shrugged.

"Very well then. There's work to be done. Grantaire sober up or leave. You are no use to us in this state." He said raising his voice slightly as if to make sure he was heard throughout the whole room. The perfect blue eyes were bloodshot Grantaire suddenly realized. The pale, fine hands trembled somewhat.

There was fear in those perfect, blue, bloodshot eyes. Grantaire recognized that fear though he himself had lost it long ago. It was the fear of a man who realizes that the alcohol has robbed him of his memory and now he must rely on that of another.

Grantaire fiddled with the watch-chain. His eyes were fixed on Enjolras' hand clutching his notes. His glanced over the slender fingers and read the heading: Early literature of ancient Greece. The boy shouldn't be here with these foolish children, Grantaire thought, he should be studying for his next exam, he should be laughing in the arms of some girl, he should be dancing at a ball his feet shod in boots of fine leather. Not here.

Not sitting across from him pale faced, eyes pleading for an answer.

There was none he could give, nothing of importance he could say.

"When the time comes will you still be here? Prostituting yourself to a bottle of absinthe?"

Grantaire wanted to tell him that it was better to be a whore to the green fairy than the beloved of the revolution. Madame Revolution, her naked limbs bloody, her soul hungering for the sacrifices of youth. Madame whose path is strewn with corpses of the innocent. Like you, Marcelin, too willing to die for a brief moment in her favor. He wanted to tell him better to leave life here, drunk, fallen, one's head cracked open on the pavement than to be slain, a martyr, with the knowledge that one had failed.

He wanted to… to speak of love, not the kind Marcelin was thinking of, glassy and heavy with lust but something pure. The love they write about, the love that would compel a man to leave his life for another man. To forget, to ignore one's own ironic convictions.

He doesn't say any of these things.

Grantaire picks up his glass in his trembling hand, afraid irrationally, of snapping the stem in two. He holds the glass up in salute and stands.

"I drink," He says slowly, his tongue held captive by alcohol. "to Marcel Auguste Enjolras, to the freedom of the people."

He sneers, looking straight ahead out into the streets.

"To all us bloody fools, I drink."


End file.
